Eric, like countless other men, moved to New York for its culture and its vibrant gay communities. But he’s always felt somewhat at odds with mainstream gay culture, and that culture is rapidly changing under the pressure of AIDS. As his friend Dale dies slowly, Eric reconsiders his own life, his choices, and the realities of being a gay man amongst gay men.
As noted in the afterword, HIV is now easily manageable, and far from the death sentence it once represented. But that transition—along with new political visibility for LGBTQ people, new marriage rights, and more—has also obscured, in some ways, the fact that America has never truly reckoned with the AIDS crisis. Richard Willett’s A FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S therefore contributes to a necessary body of work reflecting on that crisis. More importantly, though, it moves beyond the first layer of trauma—the confusion, powerlessness, and immense loss—and into deeper human territory. Eric is so compelling, and the book so readable, because it peers unflinchingly into the complexity of identity, community, and belonging. Gay men form a kind of “secret society,” with its own norms and codes, but Eric feels isolated and alienated from it. He doesn’t fit in at clubs or parties; his individual relationship with Dale is strained and often opaque; he’s not always clear that he even enjoys the mechanics of sex with other men. These thematic strains foreground and contextualize Eric’s humanity, profoundly enriching the reading experience.
Those themes are carefully developed through agile, pointed prose. A FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S has an eye for a strong turn of phrase, as when Eric watches yuppies in corporate drag on their way to work, and “[envies] the clarity of their delusions.” Sometimes the characters, all of whom moved to New York from smaller places, lean back on a kind of funny, sad, folksy wisdom: “I had been to bed with so many supposedly straight men,” Dale muses, “men who passed in their day-to-day lives; the closet is very big in the Mid-West.” The story is about AIDS, and about sex, and about humanity, and those embodied experiences live in the prose as well. Eric’s sexual encounters carry “the weight of a sadness that sex failed utterly to articulate.”
A FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S is about a historical moment, as well as a social and political identity. But with this constant return to the fundamentals of living, it is essentially about being human.
Richard Willett’s A FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S beautifully evokes how the AIDS crisis complicated the humanity of gay life for men in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader